Sherry Chandler » Musing about Poets and Poetry
Musing about Poets and Poetry
Literally, then, a poem’s narrative is its rhythm or movement of words. If a dramatist writes a speech in prose, and then rewrites in in blank verse, he has made a strategic rhythmical change, and therefore a change in the literal narrative. Even if he alters “came a day” to “a day came” he has still made a tiny alteration of sequence, and so, literally, of his rhythm and narrative. Similarly, a poem’s meaning is literally its pattern or integrity as a verbal structure.
— Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
I read this to mean that a poem is “about” its structure. It means what it says in the way that it says it and cannot be paraphrased.
Which leads me back to an old dictum of mine: Style is content.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, musing on Donald Hall in the NYTimes, asks [and answers] this question:
The question, What is poetry for? has a corollary: What is everything that is not poetry for? That’s what I found myself wondering as I reread Donald Hall’s poem “The One Day” after hearing the good news that he will be the next poet laureate of the United States. The question has a circular, elliptical answer. In the life of a poet, what is not poetry is for the making of poems. It is the raw stuff…
Yesterday when I broke the news to a friend of mine that Donald Hall had been named our new Poet Laureate, her response was “Oh no! I love Donald Hall. This is the only thing he’s ever done that has disappointed me.”
Why, you might ask, is it a betrayal to accept the laurel crown? Klinkenborg may address that question, too:
It’s assumed that the laureate will try to advance the cause of poetry — especially the public awareness of poetry — in a manner somehow separate from the writing of poems. To speak on behalf of poetry sounds like a natural task for a poet, and for some poets it certainly is. I don’t know whether Donald Hall will turn out to be that kind of laureate, and, in a way, I hope he doesn’t. So much of his poetry has emerged from the rigor of his privacy — from what appears in his verse to be a deep, unsettling sense of what’s possible in one’s life. There’s always the temptation for the laureate to find some anodyne ground to stand on. But these are not anodyne times.
It is a thoughtful meditation on Hall and the laurels that deserves to be read in its entirety.
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5 Comments
1. Melinda (Sour Duck) replies at 15th June 2006, 11:09 am :
“Which leads me back to an old dictum of mine: Style is content.”
Pointers to previous posts of yours that expand on this…?
2. sherry replies at 15th June 2006, 11:24 am :
No, Melinda. I hadn’t really mentioned this before. Maybe I should think about it and try to expound. But it seems simple — I think how you say is what you say. Maybe this is just some kind of strange poet-think. But Faulkner is not Hemingway, to choose an extreme example, in large part because of the way they put words together into sentences and sentences together into stories. Let me think about it and get back to you.
3. Melinda (Sour Duck) replies at 17th June 2006, 11:32 am :
Thanks for the further explanation! I enjoyed reading it.
Best,
Melinda
4. sherry replies at 18th June 2006, 7:04 am :
Coincidentally, Melinda, a mutual friend just e-mailed me this comment about the Open Source Blogsday broadcast:
Sometimes though, the most beautiful writing is the plainest, the most content-filled. It can’t just be about style. Paris Hilton and George W. Bush are both examples of style without content. (And so, in my convoluted way of thinking, their style is their content and it’s all empty, with varying degrees of harm to everybody.)
The best writing handbooks I know for conveying information are Joseph M. Wiliams’s Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (The University of Chicago Press, 1989) and its companion Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (Longman, 1997). These have been my textbooks during my years as medical editor, and let me tell you, nobody can garble prose like a doctor facing peer review.
And I think they’ve helped my poetry, too.
5. Sherry Chandler » P&hellip replies at 20th June 2006, 5:19 am :
[...] Charlie Hughes of Wind Publications is always way out ahead of me. For example, I pointed you all through to Verlyn Klinkenborg’s NYTimes reflection on Donald Hall and his appointment as U [...]
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